The SONY job

I've worked on allot of cool projects but one of my favorite finished projects was a SONY commercial I did summer of 2012. I was doing art department under JP Gutierrez production designer on the job. The first day of shooting started at 6am the day after my birthday, needless to say I didn't get a ton of sleep. I was lucky the shoot was in the Glendale studio which at the time was very close to where I lived. The other plus about that studio is that my homie is the stage manager, it's always nice to know the guy in charge. The commercial was for a new pair of SONY 3D goggles. The theme of the commercial is that the glasses are so intense you will actually experience what happens in the video your watching. JP designed 3 amazing living room sets for the job. A big part of my job was driving the 5 ton truck around and picking up props and other set dressings. If you watch the video you will notice an amazing Eames chair that I had the pleasure of picking up from Rapport on LaBrea. I love Rapport they have such amazing modern furniture. One of my favorite segments in the video is an explosion that a SFX artist (Aaron, Alien Resurrection) I know performed. After the explosion, a close up of the actors ear was filmed while Aaron shot it with a blast of air and some foam, very cool. Unfortunately Aaron tested it on me first and had the levels a little too high. It stung pretty bad and the way I screamed Aaron thought I was going to turn around and sock him. Well I didn't and instead had a pretty good laugh out of it. I love the movie biz!!

The Contest

Last year I decided to film and enter a spec commercial for the website Poptent. If that last sentence confused the heck out of you let me explain. A spec; is a commercial that is filmed with out the companies knowledge and out of your own pocket, with the hope that you impress someone. Poptent runs contests for spec commercials that end with the companies purchasing said commercials. This contest was for SIM Mobile, a pay as you go cell phone company. Their big thing is you can remove your sim card and put it any phone (I'm not sure who owns a phone that still uses sim cards). SIM Mobile wanted a gritty urban feeling while using the tag line "More for the People". For some reason the future set battle scenes from Terminator kept popping into my head. The shooting went pretty well, I even used a few actors from the Cat Power video "Cherokee" I worked on. I called in allot of favors on this one including my old pal Moses Martinez who shot 2nd Unit. My major problem with this project were the post issues. Mainly the music and sound, I had a friend who promised three days in a row to come over and help. Six hours before the deadline to upload the video my buddy Anthony Ceglia and I created the music and sfx using Final Cut. Not everything came out the way I wanted but I was still really happy with how everything came out and I love all the acting. Enjoy!

[WELCOME TO] LEVEL 7, the beginning of my troubles

Welcome to Level 7 was the first job I worked on where I was doing art department. For those of you not aware of what art department is I'll explain. First there is a production designer, he designs the look of the project, he then has art department and set decorators make his vision. This story starts a week before the shoot, I got hired as art coordinator. My job was to call different rental houses, give CC info, rent trucks and even pick up some stuff. I had just picked up a giant fog machine when my power steering went out about 15 miles from home during rush hour the night before the first day of shooting. Well some how I limped back to Eagle Rock and my awesome mechanic stayed 45 minutes late and fixed it, thanks Budtho!! Well the next day the shoot started and I became the low man on the totem pole, art PA(production assistant). Our day started at 4am, oh by the way we were filming at Linda Vista hospital, a reportadly haunted hospital. Stay tuned tomorrow for the 2nd half of this story.

Welcome to Level 7, a terrifying descent into low pay, long hours and bad craft service.




Linda Vista, my favorite haunted hospital in Los Angeles